Decide to allow meat to be dessert, but then refuse to eat your own piece after the holiday dinner that features it. The next morning, eat it for breakfast: take the thick slice and warm it in the cookstove oven until it is crisp. Don’t let it anywhere near the microwave or the crust will turn to mush.
To make mincemeat, start with the neck of something wild: venison, elk, caribou, or moose. The neck is stringy and boney, but flavor lives between the muscle and the bone, which makes the neck a place of opportunity. Put the neck in salted water in a big pot and boil it for several hours until the meat comes loose. Take the bones out and discard them. Separate the meat from the broth, keeping both. Let cool. Run the stringy cooked meat through a grinder with twice as many apples as you have meat—some tasty tart kind—and a third as much suet as you have meat. Use a whole orange or lemon for every five pounds or so of meat. Suet is not just fat but kidney fat from inside the animal. Few butchers’ counters think that you know this. If you didn’t save the suet when you butchered, then get fresh real beef suet from a butcher shop. Argue with them if you need to.
Now you are ready to cook the mincemeat, probably in the same large stock pot where you cooked the neck. For every 5 pounds of meat you originally got from the neck, you will need 1 ½ pints of apple cider vinegar; 1 cup of broth from cooking; 1 cup of molasses; 2 cups of sugar; ½ cup of butter; 1 tablespoon each of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg; ½ tablespoon of mace; and 2 cups of raisins. Combine ground meat-apple-suet mixture with all the other ingredients and start cooking and tasting. The mixture should have a very sweet and sour character.
If you have an Aunt Anna, this is where you throw the recipe away and stop measuring. She and you will keep tasting the mincemeat and move it toward your own ideas of delicious: adding sugar, vinegar, salt, spices, or lemon rind as needed. When you are satisfied, can or freeze the mixture in quarts for pie-making. When assembling a mincemeat pie, slice a fresh apple on top, with a pat of butter, before applying the top crust.
Gather the family. If you grew up eating mincemeat pie at holidays, some of those present will be dead, but they will invite themselves and they will be welcome. Remember that eastern Oregon farm ladies wore those printed aprons that hung around their necks with the strings tied in back and they hardly ever sat down. Remember that the men had waited a long time to eat this pie, coming in from fields that are gone now. Don’t worry if your father pushes his chair back; he’s the one who taught you to save your piece of pie for breakfast. You belong to these people. Set a big table.